 |
| Continued on page 164 |
Holland and Germany
Travel Circuit
Photo by RATHENAU-PIX
· Tourists who've been warned and rightly so, that American dollars won't stretch nearly so far abroad as the myths would have it, can still find places outside the more obvious travel meccas of Europe where their holiday dollars will buy them an unsuspected lot of comfort and fun. Holland, certainly, is one of the more rewarding, pleasant and accessible countries where this holds true in these inflationary days, and for all its tininess, its canal-linked cities are abundantly rich in a variety of things to do, see and buy which are all considerably less battering to the budget than the familiar London-Paris-Rome circuit of the grand tour.
The Royal Dutch Airlines, KLM, can get you to Amsterdam in one of its huge "Flying Dutchmen" with the greatest of ease, speed and largesse, and you can stop there for a time, en route to any other place in Europe where you may have to be or want to go, without detour or difficulty. The superb food, drink and service of the flight turn out to be characteristic of the Dutch on their land legs as well.
Amsterdam, with its charming network of canals, its sixteenth-and seventeenth-century architecture lining the wide, clean streets, is one of the prettiest and most comfortable cities of Europe. It is easy to move around in, and the fact that practically everyone speaks English means that the American tourist can avoid much of the bewilderment and arm flailing confusion that often make his continental travels disheartening. For a double room with private bath, overlooking one of the canals, de luxe hotels like the Amstel, and first-rate places like the Victoria actually charge a good deal less than you'd have to pay for the same spanking, clean comfort in London or Paris. The Dutch custom, like the English, includes breakfast in the reckoning, an excellent meal of Dutch cheese, thin slices of black ",doorbeggor" generous hunks of "peperkoek" (a delicious honeycake) and excellent coffee.
The best way to see Amsterdam is to take the hour-and-a-quarter trip in one of the sight-seeing motorboats through the canals and into the harbor-the price, 26 cents.
A multilingual guide, who shifts with staggering versatility from Dutch to English to French to German, points out the principal sights of the city-the old "Tower of Tears" from which Henry Hudson set sail; the lovely houses with contrasting facades on the Gentleman's Canal, where the merchants prospering on trade with the East lived in the seventeenth century; the beautiful old warehouses of the Amsterdam harbor. Any trip to Holland should allow a lot of time for its superb museums, with their rich treasure troves of great Dutch painting. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which houses Rembrandt's "Night Watch" and a glutton's plenty of his other work, as well as gallery after gallery of Vermeer, de Hooch and a Dutch treat of the other masters; the Rembrandt House, with the greatest collection in the world of the master's etchings and drawings; the lovely Mauritshuis in The Hague; the Frans Hals Museum in Haarmel, are all easier to move through and considerably better arranged and lighted than more Baedeker-starred places like the Louvre and the Uffizi of Florence.
A fascinating compote of museums antique gallery, bistro and restaurant is the famous Five Flies on Amsterdam's Squistraat, run by a superb showman named Nicolaas Kroese. Housed in an interconnected row of small seventeenth-century buildings, the place takes its name from the ancestor of Kroese who was the original builder (Jan Janszoon Vijffvliegen or John Johnson Five-Flies), and it's an incredible labyrinthine maze of bars and dining rooms festooned at every inch and corner with antique kettles, tiles, candles, ship's lanterns, music boxes and old Dutch furniture. Start off the evening bolting the quietly potent Dutch gin called Genever in one of the several downstairs rooms ( Ye Olde Cellar or the Hall of Knights or the Rembrandt Room). The waiters are dressed in seventeenth-century velvet costume, and two excellent tenors sing Dutch folk songs to the accompaniment of antique banjos. To get to dinner in the restaurant upstairs, you grope along rope handrails up a very steep flight of stairs. Specialties of the house are duck with orange or chicken in casserole, for a dinner which costs between two and three dollars.
The food is excellent both at the Five Flies and another of Kroese's Amsterdam restaurants, the Black Sheep, where the waiters are dressed in Volendam costume, and the antiques are as plentiful as the gin, beer and the thoroughly inoffensive, if thoroughly conscious, quaintness of the whole place.
Holland is such a tiny country that it is possible to get from one to another of the principal cities, from Amsterdam to The Hague, Haarlem, Utrecht and Rotterdam, in very short order and still have time for stops at the innumerable, charming little towns in and around the way. Because it is such a flat country Holland is a cyclist's paradise, and there are almost as many bicycles, in town and country both, as there, are people. All the roads are equipped with special cycling paths, and several excellent, very inclusive itineraries for cycling tourists have been mapped out by the ANVV, the Netherlands National Tourist Office at 10 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, or 38 Parkstraat in The Hague. If you hire a bicycle, once the KLM lands you in Amsterdam it's a fine way to absorb the quiet, spacious beauties of the Dutch landscape and the soft, evocative light through which the windmills and farmhouses loom in brooding relief.
The Hague, less than 35 miles from Amsterdam, is the royal residence and diplomatic center of Holland, a staid and dignified city that makes a fine base for exploring the Dutch countryside farther south than Amsterdam, Double rooms with private baths at the de luxe hotels Des lndes and Vieux Doelen are cheap by American standards. Near by is The Hague's beach resort. Scheveningen, for swimming in the North Sea and a look at the herring fleet, manned and kept in order by fishermen and women in regional costume.
The charming city of Delft, where the famous blue-white chinaware is manufactured, is only a few miles southeast of The Hague, and its canals, narrow streets and tidy little houses combine into a perfect example of a typical, small, ancient Dutch city, With either The Hague or Amsterdam as a starting point you can explore the great bulb-fields that bloom in the spring between Haarlem and Leyden, Tuliptime in Holland comes between March and May, and the high point of a visit to the region is at Keukenhof, near Lisse, 60 acres packed with bulb-flowers which put on a natural flower show all the spring long. Four-and six-day tours, focusing on the tulip fields but ranging out to all the principal attractions of Holland, can be arranged for Easter or April or early May, or Whitsuntide. Of course, in a country like Holland, which is almost as much water as it is land, one of the pleasantest ways of moving around is by boat through the interconnected canals. You can even go by steamer to Basel in five days direct from Rotterdam, whose harbor connects with the Rhine.
Each of the outlying parts of Holland has its own unique traditional dress, and Marken and Volendam are the most famous of the places that have retained their old costumes and customs, But a less tourist-conscious backwater on the Zuyder Zee, and perhaps more authentic, is Spakenburg, extremely quiet, clean and puritanical, where attempts to photograph them are frowned on by the natives. There, women dressed in lace caps, long billowing skirts and stiff shields of colored print cloth across their shoulders and backs can be seen wheeling babies in streamlined modern prams along the main canal.
Not far from Spakenburg, only 20 miles from Amsterdam, secluded in the woods between Hilversum and Baarn, is one of the most charming hotels in northern Europe, the Castle Hooge Vuursche. Despite the name, the prices are considerably less than princely. The castle was originally built by a wealthy Dutch businessman as a present for his young bride, and the seclusion, quiet and luxurious peace of the hotel make it a superb haven for a honeymoon. The rooms are a perfection of comfort and grandeur, with that rare quality in any hotel of suggesting permanence rather than transience. The hotel is rich in terraces, ponds and 70 acres of woods, and you can ride, golf or swim the days away. And the chef is a wizard.
Like most countries, tiny or large, which take great pride in their craftsmanship and the special flavor of the local culture, Holland has plenty of shops to satisfy a souvenir hunger and a good deal of the knickknacks on display are as laboriously quaint as tourist bait inevitably becomes. But the best things to look for, along such busy shopping streets as the Kalverstrsst in Amsterdam, are Delft chinaware, food (Edam and Gouda cheese, chocolate, the toffee like candies called Hopjes), Dutch gin and liqueurs put up in Delft blue jugs, antique and new Dutch tiles, costume jewelry made from the lovely silver buckles and buttons found in Zeeland. A good Amsterdam haunt for jewelry and silverware is the Five Flies souvenir shop, another venture run by that ubiquitous restaurateur, Nicolaas Kroese. If you remember that the Dutch guilder is worth about 25 cents American, it's easy to compute the cost of your purchases into familiar-sounding amounts.
KLM, by the way, has recently inaugurated direct flight service between New York and Frankfurt and Munich, in the American Zone of Germany. You can visit family, beaux and friends who are working for the occupation government (though you don't need so specific a reason to go there, of course), for the cost of your ticket and a $2.00 visa which can now be obtained direct from the German consulates in either New York or Chicago. Since the KLM flights to and from Germany make a stop at their home base, Amsterdam, you might want to combine the trip with a stopover in Holland.
The war souvenirs of rubble, burned-out husks of buildings and jagged walls are still in depressingly plain relief throughout the two principal cities of the American Zone in Germany, but neither Frankfurt nor Munich is desolate, dead or uncomfortable for the curious visitor. Munich, that jewel in the crown of the famous Ludwigs of Bavaria, is still a fascinating city, with enough remnants of its former glories to give more than a slight idea of its claim to greatness.
There is no shortage of excellent hotel accommodation, superb food, and of course the magnificent Bavarian beer still flows as freely as the waters of Niagara. The Bayerischer Hof, in the Promenadeplatz, has been rebuilt and is excellent. The famous restaurant Schwarzwalder’s Natur Weinhaus in the Hartmannstrasse was uninjured during the war, and the specialty, pheasant and sauerkraut, is available in familiar, if slightly staggering, German plenty. As a prewar guidebook put it, "the good Beer Houses in Munich are crowded all day but particularly in the evening and attract visitors of all grades of society including ladies," and the dean of them all is the great Hofbrauhaus in the Platzl, with its gigantic beer hall (“schwemme") on the ground floor, and a dining room on the next. There are as many beerhouses and beer cellars (pubs attached to breweries) in Munich as there are sidewalk cafes in Paris, but the Hofbrauhaus is the hugest and hoariest of them all.
A more regal relic of Bavaria is at Nymphenburg, one of the great showplaces on the outskirts of the city. Sightseeing buses which make the rounds of the city twice a day include a trip to Nymphenburg as part of the tour. The baroque palace, once the summer residence of the Bavarian kings, along with the ornately landscaped park and the rococo perfection of the hunting lodge, Amielenburg, are magnificent monuments of royal living, and they were hardly touched in the war.
In summer, swarms of Munchners make for the Alpine coolness of the Tegernsee, a charming lake dotted with numerous· small resorts, only about an hour and a half by bus from the city. Or, if the focus of your trip is Frankfurt (KLM will get you there in an hour from Munich) you can visit the famous spas of Wiesbaden, Homburg or Nauhiem.
Frankfurt itself is lively, though still pretty much of a shambles. The medieval quality of the "old city" with its cobblestoned streets and charming old houses (including the revered " Casa Santa" on the Grosse Hirschgraben where Goethe was born) was destroyed during the war. But the Goethe House has been reconstructed, rooms at the Frankfurter Hof are excellent, and you can sample the numerous wines, like Hochheim (the "hock" which Queen Victoria shipped in great amounts to England), and other vintages for which the surrounding country with its vast vineyards is famous. With Frankfurt as base headquarters, you can take trips along the Rhine, walks through the Taunus forest, excursions to Heidelberg or to Kronberg, site of the superbly beautiful castle built by Victoria's daughter, the Empress Fredericka. It is now a club for American officers, and you can have drinks and dinner only at the invitation of friends working for the occupation government. But it is a remarkable place and worth whatever effort you may have to make to get to see it. ------------Pearl Kazin
Travel Circuit
Photo by RATHENAU-PIX
· Tourists who've been warned and rightly so, that American dollars won't stretch nearly so far abroad as the myths would have it, can still find places outside the more obvious travel meccas of Europe where their holiday dollars will buy them an unsuspected lot of comfort and fun. Holland, certainly, is one of the more rewarding, pleasant and accessible countries where this holds true in these inflationary days, and for all its tininess, its canal-linked cities are abundantly rich in a variety of things to do, see and buy which are all considerably less battering to the budget than the familiar London-Paris-Rome circuit of the grand tour.
The Royal Dutch Airlines, KLM, can get you to Amsterdam in one of its huge "Flying Dutchmen" with the greatest of ease, speed and largesse, and you can stop there for a time, en route to any other place in Europe where you may have to be or want to go, without detour or difficulty. The superb food, drink and service of the flight turn out to be characteristic of the Dutch on their land legs as well.
Amsterdam, with its charming network of canals, its sixteenth-and seventeenth-century architecture lining the wide, clean streets, is one of the prettiest and most comfortable cities of Europe. It is easy to move around in, and the fact that practically everyone speaks English means that the American tourist can avoid much of the bewilderment and arm flailing confusion that often make his continental travels disheartening. For a double room with private bath, overlooking one of the canals, de luxe hotels like the Amstel, and first-rate places like the Victoria actually charge a good deal less than you'd have to pay for the same spanking, clean comfort in London or Paris. The Dutch custom, like the English, includes breakfast in the reckoning, an excellent meal of Dutch cheese, thin slices of black ",doorbeggor" generous hunks of "peperkoek" (a delicious honeycake) and excellent coffee.
The best way to see Amsterdam is to take the hour-and-a-quarter trip in one of the sight-seeing motorboats through the canals and into the harbor-the price, 26 cents.
A multilingual guide, who shifts with staggering versatility from Dutch to English to French to German, points out the principal sights of the city-the old "Tower of Tears" from which Henry Hudson set sail; the lovely houses with contrasting facades on the Gentleman's Canal, where the merchants prospering on trade with the East lived in the seventeenth century; the beautiful old warehouses of the Amsterdam harbor. Any trip to Holland should allow a lot of time for its superb museums, with their rich treasure troves of great Dutch painting. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which houses Rembrandt's "Night Watch" and a glutton's plenty of his other work, as well as gallery after gallery of Vermeer, de Hooch and a Dutch treat of the other masters; the Rembrandt House, with the greatest collection in the world of the master's etchings and drawings; the lovely Mauritshuis in The Hague; the Frans Hals Museum in Haarmel, are all easier to move through and considerably better arranged and lighted than more Baedeker-starred places like the Louvre and the Uffizi of Florence.
A fascinating compote of museums antique gallery, bistro and restaurant is the famous Five Flies on Amsterdam's Squistraat, run by a superb showman named Nicolaas Kroese. Housed in an interconnected row of small seventeenth-century buildings, the place takes its name from the ancestor of Kroese who was the original builder (Jan Janszoon Vijffvliegen or John Johnson Five-Flies), and it's an incredible labyrinthine maze of bars and dining rooms festooned at every inch and corner with antique kettles, tiles, candles, ship's lanterns, music boxes and old Dutch furniture. Start off the evening bolting the quietly potent Dutch gin called Genever in one of the several downstairs rooms ( Ye Olde Cellar or the Hall of Knights or the Rembrandt Room). The waiters are dressed in seventeenth-century velvet costume, and two excellent tenors sing Dutch folk songs to the accompaniment of antique banjos. To get to dinner in the restaurant upstairs, you grope along rope handrails up a very steep flight of stairs. Specialties of the house are duck with orange or chicken in casserole, for a dinner which costs between two and three dollars.
The food is excellent both at the Five Flies and another of Kroese's Amsterdam restaurants, the Black Sheep, where the waiters are dressed in Volendam costume, and the antiques are as plentiful as the gin, beer and the thoroughly inoffensive, if thoroughly conscious, quaintness of the whole place.
Holland is such a tiny country that it is possible to get from one to another of the principal cities, from Amsterdam to The Hague, Haarlem, Utrecht and Rotterdam, in very short order and still have time for stops at the innumerable, charming little towns in and around the way. Because it is such a flat country Holland is a cyclist's paradise, and there are almost as many bicycles, in town and country both, as there, are people. All the roads are equipped with special cycling paths, and several excellent, very inclusive itineraries for cycling tourists have been mapped out by the ANVV, the Netherlands National Tourist Office at 10 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, or 38 Parkstraat in The Hague. If you hire a bicycle, once the KLM lands you in Amsterdam it's a fine way to absorb the quiet, spacious beauties of the Dutch landscape and the soft, evocative light through which the windmills and farmhouses loom in brooding relief.
The Hague, less than 35 miles from Amsterdam, is the royal residence and diplomatic center of Holland, a staid and dignified city that makes a fine base for exploring the Dutch countryside farther south than Amsterdam, Double rooms with private baths at the de luxe hotels Des lndes and Vieux Doelen are cheap by American standards. Near by is The Hague's beach resort. Scheveningen, for swimming in the North Sea and a look at the herring fleet, manned and kept in order by fishermen and women in regional costume.
The charming city of Delft, where the famous blue-white chinaware is manufactured, is only a few miles southeast of The Hague, and its canals, narrow streets and tidy little houses combine into a perfect example of a typical, small, ancient Dutch city, With either The Hague or Amsterdam as a starting point you can explore the great bulb-fields that bloom in the spring between Haarlem and Leyden, Tuliptime in Holland comes between March and May, and the high point of a visit to the region is at Keukenhof, near Lisse, 60 acres packed with bulb-flowers which put on a natural flower show all the spring long. Four-and six-day tours, focusing on the tulip fields but ranging out to all the principal attractions of Holland, can be arranged for Easter or April or early May, or Whitsuntide. Of course, in a country like Holland, which is almost as much water as it is land, one of the pleasantest ways of moving around is by boat through the interconnected canals. You can even go by steamer to Basel in five days direct from Rotterdam, whose harbor connects with the Rhine.
Each of the outlying parts of Holland has its own unique traditional dress, and Marken and Volendam are the most famous of the places that have retained their old costumes and customs, But a less tourist-conscious backwater on the Zuyder Zee, and perhaps more authentic, is Spakenburg, extremely quiet, clean and puritanical, where attempts to photograph them are frowned on by the natives. There, women dressed in lace caps, long billowing skirts and stiff shields of colored print cloth across their shoulders and backs can be seen wheeling babies in streamlined modern prams along the main canal.
Not far from Spakenburg, only 20 miles from Amsterdam, secluded in the woods between Hilversum and Baarn, is one of the most charming hotels in northern Europe, the Castle Hooge Vuursche. Despite the name, the prices are considerably less than princely. The castle was originally built by a wealthy Dutch businessman as a present for his young bride, and the seclusion, quiet and luxurious peace of the hotel make it a superb haven for a honeymoon. The rooms are a perfection of comfort and grandeur, with that rare quality in any hotel of suggesting permanence rather than transience. The hotel is rich in terraces, ponds and 70 acres of woods, and you can ride, golf or swim the days away. And the chef is a wizard.
Like most countries, tiny or large, which take great pride in their craftsmanship and the special flavor of the local culture, Holland has plenty of shops to satisfy a souvenir hunger and a good deal of the knickknacks on display are as laboriously quaint as tourist bait inevitably becomes. But the best things to look for, along such busy shopping streets as the Kalverstrsst in Amsterdam, are Delft chinaware, food (Edam and Gouda cheese, chocolate, the toffee like candies called Hopjes), Dutch gin and liqueurs put up in Delft blue jugs, antique and new Dutch tiles, costume jewelry made from the lovely silver buckles and buttons found in Zeeland. A good Amsterdam haunt for jewelry and silverware is the Five Flies souvenir shop, another venture run by that ubiquitous restaurateur, Nicolaas Kroese. If you remember that the Dutch guilder is worth about 25 cents American, it's easy to compute the cost of your purchases into familiar-sounding amounts.
KLM, by the way, has recently inaugurated direct flight service between New York and Frankfurt and Munich, in the American Zone of Germany. You can visit family, beaux and friends who are working for the occupation government (though you don't need so specific a reason to go there, of course), for the cost of your ticket and a $2.00 visa which can now be obtained direct from the German consulates in either New York or Chicago. Since the KLM flights to and from Germany make a stop at their home base, Amsterdam, you might want to combine the trip with a stopover in Holland.
The war souvenirs of rubble, burned-out husks of buildings and jagged walls are still in depressingly plain relief throughout the two principal cities of the American Zone in Germany, but neither Frankfurt nor Munich is desolate, dead or uncomfortable for the curious visitor. Munich, that jewel in the crown of the famous Ludwigs of Bavaria, is still a fascinating city, with enough remnants of its former glories to give more than a slight idea of its claim to greatness.
There is no shortage of excellent hotel accommodation, superb food, and of course the magnificent Bavarian beer still flows as freely as the waters of Niagara. The Bayerischer Hof, in the Promenadeplatz, has been rebuilt and is excellent. The famous restaurant Schwarzwalder’s Natur Weinhaus in the Hartmannstrasse was uninjured during the war, and the specialty, pheasant and sauerkraut, is available in familiar, if slightly staggering, German plenty. As a prewar guidebook put it, "the good Beer Houses in Munich are crowded all day but particularly in the evening and attract visitors of all grades of society including ladies," and the dean of them all is the great Hofbrauhaus in the Platzl, with its gigantic beer hall (“schwemme") on the ground floor, and a dining room on the next. There are as many beerhouses and beer cellars (pubs attached to breweries) in Munich as there are sidewalk cafes in Paris, but the Hofbrauhaus is the hugest and hoariest of them all.
A more regal relic of Bavaria is at Nymphenburg, one of the great showplaces on the outskirts of the city. Sightseeing buses which make the rounds of the city twice a day include a trip to Nymphenburg as part of the tour. The baroque palace, once the summer residence of the Bavarian kings, along with the ornately landscaped park and the rococo perfection of the hunting lodge, Amielenburg, are magnificent monuments of royal living, and they were hardly touched in the war.
In summer, swarms of Munchners make for the Alpine coolness of the Tegernsee, a charming lake dotted with numerous· small resorts, only about an hour and a half by bus from the city. Or, if the focus of your trip is Frankfurt (KLM will get you there in an hour from Munich) you can visit the famous spas of Wiesbaden, Homburg or Nauhiem.
Frankfurt itself is lively, though still pretty much of a shambles. The medieval quality of the "old city" with its cobblestoned streets and charming old houses (including the revered " Casa Santa" on the Grosse Hirschgraben where Goethe was born) was destroyed during the war. But the Goethe House has been reconstructed, rooms at the Frankfurter Hof are excellent, and you can sample the numerous wines, like Hochheim (the "hock" which Queen Victoria shipped in great amounts to England), and other vintages for which the surrounding country with its vast vineyards is famous. With Frankfurt as base headquarters, you can take trips along the Rhine, walks through the Taunus forest, excursions to Heidelberg or to Kronberg, site of the superbly beautiful castle built by Victoria's daughter, the Empress Fredericka. It is now a club for American officers, and you can have drinks and dinner only at the invitation of friends working for the occupation government. But it is a remarkable place and worth whatever effort you may have to make to get to see it. ------------Pearl Kazin
----------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment